Sermon by Bishop Basil Osborne at Friends annual service

In the Name of the Father...

It is an honour and privilege to be invited to preach at this Eucharistic service, which brings together the Friends of the Diocese in Europe around their bishop, gathered here to re-create the unity that God has given them in Christ through participation in the Lord's Supper, the 'Mystical' Supper as it would be called in the Easter Church.

I have a feeling that the Anglican Diocese in Europe may well be unique in the Christian Church - both in its geographical extent and in the extraordinary variety of circumstances in which it is called to be the presence of the Anglican Communion and the Church of England. So far as I can tell, in practically all the places in which its communities exist and are served by the clergy of the Diocese, they are in the position of being a Christian minority within what is - at least historically - a Christian society - and at times are even a minority within a Christian minority.

Historically, I suppose, this is not an unusual situation. The Church, in its various expressions, has often found itself living the Christian life in this way. Perhaps we should even begin to think of it as the norm, at least in Europe. And in fact what strikes me about the situation of the Diocese in Europe is its similarity to the situation of the Russian Church in Europe - or at least in Western and Central Europe.

We are living in interesting times, and the geopolitical context in which we live is changing at an extraordinary rate. We probably have little idea now what the world will look like in fifty years' time. Even the future shape of Europe itself is not clear. Will Turkey become a member of the European Union? And what would the effect be if it were to do so? This will be the subject of debate for many years.

But already the political face of Europe has been changed almost beyond recognition with the admission to the European Union of ten new nations on its eastern edge. As this was gradually becoming a reality and its effects were being commented upon in the newspapers, one sometimes came across statements comparing the new Europe to the Europe of Charlemagne: not since the eighth and ninth centuries had Europe been so integrated both economically and politically. And yet this was to underestimate the magnitude of the change.

The kingdom of Charlemagne did not extend beyond the boundaries of what is now called 'Western Europe'. In other words, it did not really extend beyond the territory that traditionally formed part of the Patriarchate of Rome. It was possible to make that comparison when the EU comprised twelve nations - and even perhaps when it was enlarged to include fifteen (providing one excluded Greece). But now, when we are building a Europe of twenty-five nations, the comparison is no longer really valid. Several of the new members of Europe are located on territories belonging to the ancient sphere of influence of Constantinople the New Rome, and we have to go back even further to find a suitable historical analogy.

How far back must we go to find a parallel? Should we go back to the sixth century, to the reign of Justinian, who succeeded in recapturing large areas that had previous fallen to the Vandals and the Goths, thereby bringing Italy and parts of North Africa back into the Roman world? It is an interesting idea. Under Justinian the Roman Empire was still bi-lingual. Latin was in general use in the army and the legal system, while Greek was the predominant language of culture and commerce. The Codex Justinianus, completed in 534 as systematic collection of Latin jurisprudence that continued in use in the East and went on to form the basis of the legal systems of most of Western and Eastern Europe.

But Justinian's reunification of Eastern and Western Roman Empires did not last, and in any case he never controlled more than a fraction of the West. The Germanic tribes were soon in charge again. And so, in order to find a parallel for the 'Twenty-five', we must go back yet further. Indeed, we must go back at least to the end of the fourth century, when the cultural, economic and religious world of Europe included, in a stable fashion, both Eastern and Western Christendom. In fact, if we really want to go back to a situation that parallels what we are beginning to see develop today, we must get behind even the reforms of the Emperor Diocletian, who in 286 divided the Roman Empire into two, an Eastern and Western Empire - and took the East for himself. Not for over seventeen hundred years has it been possible to contemplate a Europe that would include, without substantial political division and rivalry, both its Eastern and Western halves - both Spain and Romania, both England and Greece.

In a marvellous way the Anglican Diocese in Europe has anticipated these developments. For years now the Diocese has been working across and on both sides of that fundamental 'fault line' that
was created by Diocletian when he divided the Roman Empire in two. It is this 'fault line' which runs through the middle of modern-day Bosnia and Albania, that lies behind some of the worst political problems of the present day and sets the scene for Samuel Huntingdon's identification of an 'Eastern Orthodox' geopolitical and cultural pole in his book, The Clash of Civilisations and New World Order.

What has been the experience of the Diocese in Europe, I ask myself, as it has worked across this invisible and yet very real border? Has it been that of the Austrian Minister of Finance who said: 'Europe ends where Orthodoxy begins?' I somehow doubt it.

But there is no doubt that the history of Europe, in some ways, looks quite different depending on whether you approach it from the East or from the West. In the Eastern Mediterranean and South Eastern Europe the flow of political, social and economic development extends without major interruption from the reign of the Emperor Augustus down to the Fall of Constantinople in 1453. It is a story of gradual diminution, of course, as first the Arabs and then the Turks cut off greater and greater swaths of territory as they move in from the North and East. But nonetheless there is essential continuity. And that continuity continues on a cultural and religious level even after the fall of Byzantium. Byzance après Byzance is a reality, both within the areas covered by the gradually shrinking Byzantine Empire and outside of it, in particular in Russia, which preserved many attributes of the Byzantine world right down to the Bolshevick Revolution of 1917 - and, some would say, beyond.

Western Europe had a very different history. The invading Germanic tribes overwhelmed the Western Empire less than on hundred and fifty years after it was born. Out of the chaos that ensued there gradually emerged the nation states of Western Europe, all of which were formed within and carried within themselves the theological, spiritual and disciplinary traditions of the Patriarchate of Rome. The development of the feudal system, of highly intellectual theological schools, the influence of ancient philosophy, first through contact with the Muslim world and then directly through the Greek texts, the development of Western humanism in the Renaissance and the subsequent Reformation and Age of Enlightenment - all these were things that most Christians of the East at first experienced only at second hand. They did not begin to impact directly on Eastern Christianity until a much later date, in some areas not until the twentieth century.

The reason I mention all this is that the Anglican Diocese in Europe has now had years of experience in dealing with Christians, at a practical and not simply theological level, who come out of these two differing Christian traditions. And this puts you in a privileged position for addressing a question that now stands before us all: what does the history of Europe look like if we try to incorporate into our understanding of it the experience of both 'halves' of European Christianity?

I know from experience that even someone with a doctorate in history, unless they have specialised in Eastern Europe, knows virtually nothing about its history, much less its literature and its spiritual tradition. Eastern Europe - and the Eastern Church- are not even on the horizon. We teach the classics of Russian literature in our universities with only the slightest reference to the Eastern Christianity that is so strongly present in it. Something similar could be said about Greece. I remember travelling to Greece as a young student of the Greek classics and finding the Greek Church a closed book. I loved the modern culture, the life that was lived in the villages and on the streets, but the faith that informed it was a mystery.

The Church of England has been present on the continent of Europe since at least the seventeenth century. At first (as I learned from the Diocesan website) the parishes there were directly under the Bishop of London. The Diocese of Gibraltar was then formed in 1842 to take care of the extensive Anglican presence in the Mediterranean, and in 1883 the communities in Northern and Central Europe were placed under a suffragan of the Bishop of London, the Bishop of Fulham. Eventually responsibility for the whole of this presence was given to the Bishop of Gibraltar as bishop of the Diocese in Europe.

But, strange as this may seem, a similar process was taking place with the Russian Church, only at a more recent date. Russian embassy chapels and the few purpose-built Russian churches constructed in Europe for the nobility during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were administered by the Metropolitan of St. Petersburg, the city which was then Russia's window on the West'. With the restoration of the Patriarchate of Moscow in 1917-18 and under the conditions of the communist regime these parishes were dealt with by the Holy Synod in Moscow, eventually being administered through the Department of External Church Relations.

But in April 2003 the Patriarch published a letter addressed to all the parishes 'of the Russian tradition' and their bishops in which he invited them to come together to form a single, semi-autonomous 'metropolia', made up of several dioceses, in Western and Central Europe and within the Patriarchate of Moscow. The reception given to this suggestion has been mixed, and nothing is likely to come of it for some time. But the idea itself will not go away.

The parishes that would make up such a 'metropolia' would share much of the experience of the Anglican Diocese in Europe. They too would be made up of communities living as minorities within countries historically belonging to another tradition. They too would have crossed the 'fault line' between the Eastern and Western Churches. They too would be in a position to begin to understand, from inside what a history of Europe that embraced both halves of Christianity might be like. One that was not centred not just on the experience of the Western Churches, but included the Eastern Churches as well.

The collapse of communism has brought a new Europe into being. We don't yet know just what this new Europe will be like. But it is my hope that the recent arrivals from the former communist block countries will be good Europeans, and will put their understanding of the history of Eastern Europe - and of its Eastern theological tradition - to good use in the years to come, not least in contributing to the history of Europe that has yet to be written: a history that takes us in a single sweep from the world of late antiquity before the division of the Roman Empire into two halves, through the centuries of estrangement, down to the present (at least partial) reintegration of these two halves in a single political and economic entity.

Surely the Anglican Diocese in Europe has a role to play in this process. Its past experience and its current openness to the variety that is Europe equip its members - and their Friends - to do just this.